How much money will be spent on health care interoperability over the next decade? How many disparate systems need to be connected within and among hospitals, clinics, labs, Medicaid agencies, and all other healthcare stakeholders? Millions of installed systems from hundreds of vendors? To wit, take a look at the following application categories:
- clinical decision support
- self-service patient portals
- clinical dashboards delivered to smart phones and tablets
They all require interoperability with other systems in order to deliver core functionality. The conventional approach to interoperability is either to build a point-to-point hardwired connection or to install a proprietary interface engine. Considering the number of systems that will be connected over the coming years, both of these approaches are profoundly wasteful.
What if the world's hospitals could leverage all others' interoperability work? In other words, what if there was an open library of the most commonly used connectors available for all to use? And what if these connectors plugged into a standards-based open source interface engine that was available as a free download? What if the connector library grew organically as the user base of the open source interface engine grew? It would save a lot of time and money in an industry that is desperately looking for efficiency.
Axial has partnered with MuleSoft to get started making this vision a reality. Today, we made a community version of an open source healthcare interface engine, Axial 360, available as a free download.
It didn't take us long to understand MuleSoft is the ideal partner for open source interoperability. Not only do they have street cred as the leading open source ESB, but they are also a group of scrappy and smart developers and business people. They understand that something as enormous as health care interoperability cannot be solved with a conventional proprietary approach.
Interested in participating? Go here and download 360 today.
